Modern e-commerce platforms strive to enhance customer experience by providing timely and contextually relevant recommendations. However, recommending general merchandise to customers focused on grocery shopping -- such as pairing milk with a milk frother -- remains a critical yet under-explored challenge. This paper introduces a cross-pollination (XP) framework, a novel approach that bridges grocery and general merchandise cross-category recommendations by leveraging multi-source product associations and real-time cart context. Our solution employs a two-stage framework: (1) A candidate generation mechanism that uses co-purchase market basket analysis and LLM-based approach to identify novel item-item associations; and (2) a transformer-based ranker that leverages the real-time sequential cart context and optimizes for engagement signals such as add-to-carts. Offline analysis and online A/B tests show an increase of 36\% add-to-cart rate with LLM-based retrieval on the item page, and 15\% lift in add-to-cart using cart context-based ranker on the cart page. Our work contributes practical techniques for cross-category recommendations and broader insights for e-commerce systems.

Agentic AI is emerging, capable of executing tasks through natural language, such as Copilot for coding or Amazon Rufus for shopping. Evaluating these systems is challenging, as their rapid evolution outpaces traditional human evaluation. Researchers have proposed LLM Agents to simulate participants as digital twins, but it remains unclear to what extent a digital twin can represent a specific customer in multi-turn interaction with an agentic AI system. In this paper, we recruited 40 human participants to shop with Amazon Rufus, collected their personas, interaction traces, and UX feedback, and then created digital twins to repeat the task. Pairwise comparison of human and digital-twin traces shows that while agents often explored more diverse choices, their action patterns aligned with humans and yielded similar design feedback. This study is the first to quantify how closely LLM agents can mirror human multi-turn interaction with an agentic AI system, highlighting their potential for scalable evaluation.

Amazon Will Pay $2.5 Billion to Settle FTC Suit That Alleged'Dark Patterns' in Prime Sign-Ups Amazon will pay both the Federal Trade Commission and consumers directly to settle a lawsuit alleging that it used manipulative and deceptive tactics to encourage sign-ups for Prime. Amazon has agreed to pay $2.5 billion to settle a lawsuit filed by the Federal Trade Commission, which alleged that the company has "knowingly duped" millions of people into enrolling in its Amazon Prime membership program by using what the FTC has described as " dark patterns, " or, manipulative, coercive, or deceptive user-interface designs." The settlement claimed that Amazon "obtains consumers' billing information before it discloses all material terms for an Amazon Prime subscription," and in doing so, was in violation of the Restore Online Shoppers' Confidence Act, which was signed into law in 2010 to prevent the use of deception to prompt or encourage online purchases. The $2.5 billion payment includes $1 billion that has to be paid to the FTC, and $1.5 billion that will go directly to consumers who unknowingly signed up for Prime, or tried and failed to cancel their Prime subscriptions due to Amazon's online interface, between June 23, 2019 and June 23, 2025. Individual consumers can get compensated up to $51 each. In a statement released by the FTC on Tuesday, agency chairman Andrew Ferguson said that the settlement "made history and secured a record-breaking, monumental win for the millions of Americans who are tired of deceptive subscriptions that feel impossible to cancel." "Today, we are putting billions of dollars back into Americans' pockets, and making sure Amazon never does this again," Ferguson said. Amazon spokesperson Alisa Carroll tells WIRED that there was "no admission of guilt in this settlement by the company or any executives.

This previous-generation machine still chugs along, and you'll save a bunch of cash. All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links. If you need a lightweight laptop with some gaming chops, last year's model of the Asus TUF Gaming A14 (8/10, WIRED Recommends) is currently marked down to just $900 at Walmart . This budget-friendly laptop was already a good choice at its original price, and is even more appealing when it's discounted to under $1,000.

Amazon Prime Day is back on October 7, but we've already found good deals on WIRED-approved gear. All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links. It's that time of year again, and Prime Day deals are back. The Amazon Prime Big Deal Days event--also known as Amazon Prime Day 2--is technically arriving on October 7 and 8, but early deals have already started.

We may earn revenue from the products available on this page and participate in affiliate programs. The company has been making great jackets, bags, and pretty much everything else you need for outdoor activities since 1973. "While Patagonia stuff is great, it's not usually cheap. Fortunately, REI currently has a ton of last year's products on sale with steep discounts. That includes some of the most popular items like the puffer jackets and the fleece pullovers.

Whether your giftee loves bird watching, bird feeding, or just putting a bird on it, these gifts are sure to be a hit. All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links. You may be familiar with the various memes detailing the fact that once you reach middle age, you're automatically sorted, Harry Potter hat-style, into one of a handful of hobbies, such as sourdough bread making, gardening, or bird watching. I can't contradict this, since I'm a middle-aged person who got sorted into bird-watching.

We present a system using Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) to analyze a large database with tens of millions of images captured at different times, with the aim of discovering patterns in temporal changes. Specifically, we aim to capture frequent co-occurring changes ("trends") across a city over a certain period. Unlike previous visual analyses, our analysis answers open-ended queries (e.g., "what are the frequent types of changes in the city?") without any predetermined target subjects or training labels. These properties cast prior learning-based or unsupervised visual analysis tools unsuitable. We identify MLLMs as a novel tool for their open-ended semantic understanding capabilities. Yet, our datasets are four orders of magnitude too large for an MLLM to ingest as context. So we introduce a bottom-up procedure that decomposes the massive visual analysis problem into more tractable sub-problems. We carefully design MLLM-based solutions to each sub-problem. During experiments and ablation studies with our system, we find it significantly outperforms baselines and is able to discover interesting trends from images captured in large cities (e.g., "addition of outdoor dining,", "overpass was painted blue," etc.). See more results and interactive demos at https://boyangdeng.com/visual-chronicles.

All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links. Our favorite 4K streaming device, the Roku Streaming Stick Plus (9/10, WIRED Review), is marked down to just $29 on Amazon, a healthy discount off its already wallet-friendly price. It's easy to use, extremely compact, and priced well under its competitors. It can turn a dumb 4K TV into a smart streaming platform in under 10 minutes with minimal fuss, and there's a reason it's our Editors' Pick for 4K streaming devices .

These vegan meal kits and delivery services bring preprepared meals and meal kits to your door. All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links. Vegan-specific meal kit services are a modern miracle for vegans, who usually aren't afforded the same conveniences as meat eaters or those without dietary restrictions. We at WIRED love meal kits, because they're all about modern convenience--you can eat what you want, even if you're on a specialty diet or have strong food preferences, without ever leaving your house. Gone are the days of grocery shopping and scouring online for recipes; these contemporary vegan meal kit services do the heavy lifting for you using curated menus and algorithms, with choices for both premade microwavable meals and kits where you do the cooking yourself. Some vegan meal kit services, like Hungryroot, use AI customization to curate menus based on your specific tastes. Others, like Daily Harvest, have a set selection of choices so you can always keep your freezer stocked with vegan, gluten-free meals to have on hand.